752 research outputs found
Von Bezold assimilation effect reverses in stereoscopic conditions
Lightness contrast and lightness assimilation are opposite phenomena: in contrast,
grey targets appear darker when bordering bright surfaces (inducers) rather than dark ones; in
assimilation, the opposite occurs. The question is: which visual process favours the occurrence
of one phenomenon over the other? Researchers provided three answers to this question. The
first asserts that both phenomena are caused by peripheral processes; the second attributes their
occurrence to central processes; and the third claims that contrast involves central processes,
whilst assimilation involves peripheral ones. To test these hypotheses, an experiment on an IT
system equipped with goggles for stereo vision was run. Observers were asked to evaluate the
lightness of a grey target, and two variables were systematically manipulated: (i) the apparent
distance of the inducers; and (ii) brightness of the inducers. The retinal stimulation was kept
constant throughout, so that the peripheral processes remained the same. The results show that
the lightness of the target depends on both variables. As the retinal stimulation was kept constant, we
conclude that central mechanisms are involved in both lightness contrast and lightness assimilation
Comparison and contrast in perceptual categorization
People categorized pairs of perceptual stimuli that varied in both category membership and pairwise similarity. Experiments 1 and 2 showed categorization of 1 color of a pair to be reliably contrasted from that of the other. This similarity-based contrast effect occurred only when the context stimulus was relevant for the categorization of the target (Experiment 3). The effect was not simply owing to perceptual color contrast (Experiment 4), and it extended to pictures from common semantic categories (Experiment 5). Results were consistent with a sign-and-magnitude version of N. Stewart and G. D. A. Brown's (2005) similarity-dissimilarity generalized context model, in which categorization is affected by both similarity to and difference from target categories. The data are also modeled with criterion setting theory (M. Treisman & T. C. Williams, 1984), in which the decision criterion is systematically shifted toward the mean of the current stimuli
The Dirichlet-to-Robin Transform
A simple transformation converts a solution of a partial differential
equation with a Dirichlet boundary condition to a function satisfying a Robin
(generalized Neumann) condition. In the simplest cases this observation enables
the exact construction of the Green functions for the wave, heat, and
Schrodinger problems with a Robin boundary condition. The resulting physical
picture is that the field can exchange energy with the boundary, and a delayed
reflection from the boundary results. In more general situations the method
allows at least approximate and local construction of the appropriate reflected
solutions, and hence a "classical path" analysis of the Green functions and the
associated spectral information. By this method we solve the wave equation on
an interval with one Robin and one Dirichlet endpoint, and thence derive
several variants of a Gutzwiller-type expansion for the density of eigenvalues.
The variants are consistent except for an interesting subtlety of
distributional convergence that affects only the neighborhood of zero in the
frequency variable.Comment: 31 pages, 5 figures; RevTe
Does wage rank affect employees' well-being?
How do workers make wage comparisons? Both an experimental study and an analysis of 16,000 British employees are reported. Satisfaction and well-being levels are shown to depend on more than simple relative pay. They depend upon the ordinal rank of an individual's wage within a comparison group. âRankâ itself thus seems to matter to human beings. Moreover, consistent with psychological theory, quits in a workplace are correlated with pay distribution skewness
On-sky performance of new 90 GHz detectors for the Cosmology Large Angular Scale Surveyor (CLASS)
The Cosmology Large Angular Scale Surveyor (CLASS) is a
polarization-sensitive telescope array located at an altitude of 5,200 m in the
Chilean Atacama Desert and designed to measure the polarized Cosmic Microwave
Background (CMB) over large angular scales. The CLASS array is currently
observing with three telescopes covering four frequency bands: one at 40 GHz
(Q); one at 90 GHz (W1); and one dichroic system at 150/220 GHz (HF). During
the austral winter of 2022, we upgraded the first 90 GHz telescope (W1) by
replacing four of the seven focal plane modules. These new modules contain
detector wafers with an updated design, aimed at improving the optical
efficiency and detector stability. We present a description of the design
changes and measurements of on-sky optical efficiencies derived from
observations of Jupiter.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures, to appear in the IEEE Transactions on Applied
Superconductivity. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2208.0500
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